Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrr | Hacker News Reader

Still the best EVs on the market in terms of range, performance and price(in the US). Chevy bolt competitor wouldn’t make sense because Chevy couldn’t even make the chevy bolt work and stopped production 2023. EV trucks don’t make sense at all, they can’t tow unless you want to recharge every 100 miles. Also range is severely reduced offroading. I don’t get why auto manufacturers keep pushing them on the public.

Tesla has image problem. Y refresh is getting praise. Edmunds says its the best car they’ve driven in 2025. It should be selling like hotcakes. I don’t think anything is fixing Tesla unless they fire musk.

View on HN

The Bolt is coming back. Chevy’s reason for discontinuing it wasn’t that it didn’t sell, but that the platform was outdated. The new one is on their current platform and roughly analogous to the old EUV model.

Pricing is another question though, and no CarPlay/AA while also coming from an old guard auto manufacturer means no sale from me.

Normally when you have a popular car, you don't pull it from the market. Tesla hasn't pulled any of their products. Has a company ever done that? They sold it at a loss and now trying to make it profitable with LFP batteries and other cost cutting. I still doubt its coming out.

While it's a larger pause than normal, this actually seems to happen quite a lot when a manufacturer dumps an old EV platform; there was a gap between the Renault Zoe and 5, and between the second and third gen Leaf, say. I assume it's partially for retooling, but also "why not buy this car built on a 15 year old EV platform, btw its replacement is coming out next week" seems like a _very_ hard sell.

The bigger problem is that the Bolt would’ve been the only model on its platform, which I noted before, was outdated and not able to handle fast charging among other things.

Being a GM product, the Bolt won’t have CarPlay either.

Whys that? I've never seen a car having only one out of android auto and carplay.

GM stopped supporting both CarPlay and Android Auto in most of their EVs, except I think for those made by Cadillac, in effort to push customers into using the onboard infotainment where they can sell subscriptions.

I’m not sure that’s going to work out for them in the long run. Last I knew, Honda’s Prologue which is a rebadged Blazer EV and supports CarPlay/AA is outselling the Blazer.

I meant CarPlay and Android Auto, as GM wants to force its customers to use its software.

That’s what I said.

Oops, I misread.

It seems you don't have BYD in the US, except for buses? Here in Australia you see far more BYDs than Teslas by now. They're cheaper with a bit more range.

Nope, tarriffs. I'll admit that the 175% tarrifs on Chinese vehicles was indeed a Biden decision.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/joe-biden-china-tariff-hike...

To be precise, 100% on vehicles, 50% on solar cells, and 25% on Batteries.

This was frmom a year ago, though. Who knows if/what Trump added on top of that.

Bonus Article: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a62694325/ford-ceo-jim-far...

>Ford CEO Jim Farley admitted he has been driving a Xiaomi SU7 for six months and said he "doesn't want to give it up."

The only way I’d be interested in a Xiaomi (or any other Chinese car) is if they decided to make a Ford Panther platform lookalike that has no features dependent on phoning home to China.

For the sake of argument, why should I be more afraid of phoning home to China (a country I will probably never go to) than phoning home to the US or Canada?

If I'm making an inappropriate joke to my wife while we drive, I'd prefer the former than the later.

(Obviously, much like you I assume, I'd rather have no internet connection)

That’s by design. And people would rather put up with the allegations against Elon’s conduct over the certainty of PRC conduct.

EV trucks do make sense, because most people (in the US) want a truck and don’t tow anything.

Battery tech is rapidly improving too, which will offset the hit to range that towing involves. Best to get the designs and manufacturing figured out to be ready for the day that battery tech arrives.

> trucks don’t make sense at all, they can’t tow unless you want to recharge every 100 miles. Also range is severely reduced offroading.

Most truck drivers will never tow a thing in their lives, and they will almost certainly never offroad (unless you count the leaves on the driveway)

EV trucks make perfect sense in that context.

Lucid offers the best range of any EV. And while not really directly comparable to the Model S Plaid because it is twice the price of the Plaid—- Lucid’s Air Sapphire absolutely out performs the Plaid in every scenario. I think the days of Tesla’s dominance in the EV space are dwindling rapidly. If Lucid can get their midsized car out, at a reasonable price, I don’t see any real reason to buy a Tesla unless you just particularly fancy one. That’s not a great proposition for a company that was once considered a tech company with a huge lead over everyone else. It’s only a matter of time before the double whammy of lackluster innovation and Musk’s politics come home to roost.

Yeah, because BYD and other chinese makers are locked out.

Semi-solid state is coming for Tesla's lunch.

"Tesla has image problem." You mean the multiple nazi salutes? The "don't apologize to your past" to the AfD? Being high on something on national television? Unhinged posts on twitter? Kekius Maximus?

EVs are luxury products. You can get 90% of electification with a 50-mile-range PHEV and mitigate the charging infrastructure problem. I have a used Tesla and a PHEV, and if my PHEV only had 50 instead of the paltry 20 mile range, 100% of my daily trips would be fully electrified.

As for further examples of Musk's incompetence, there should be three different badges: Tesla, an ultra-high luxury brand that focuses on traditional cabin comfort, and a low end mass brand. They should have a minivan, station wagon, an actual large SUV, a subcompact city car, a real pickup truck, a work van, and where is the goddamn semi?

Tesla should have bought a struggling auto company for manufacturing, design, and suppliers, and used that for the low-end badge and for PHEVs. Nissan would have been perfect I would think.

Tesla should at this point have joint ventures with huge numbers of electrification avenues: construction equipment, prosumer lawn mowers, "side by sides", golf carts, ATVs, jet skis, boats, if it has an ICE motor, Tesla should be expanding into it with a good name brand.

Of course Tesla solar is moribund, the solar roof is nowhere.

And if anyone claims again that grid storage will deliver some massive sales to Tesla: any success is temporary. Grid will be won by sodium ion and other grid-specific storage chemistries that cylindrical cell manufacture won't be able to compete with.

And yet another point: Tesla's cylindrical cells were an advantage ... five years ago. It's not anymore. Sodium Ion, LFP, semi-solid state, sulfur chems, all will probably be pouch. Cylindrical is basically legacy manufacturing tech.

Musk's cozying up and inevitable fallout with Trump definitely put the EV credits in crosshairs. Probably wouldn't have survived the era of insanity, but that gravy train (1/3 of tesla's profits ... at least) is over.

Finally, let's not forget the total disaster that the dry-cathode 4680 battery cell is. Basically still vaporware, and the Chinese manufacturers have better tech already in manufacture.

AND YET, I'm sure the stock will go up based on the bad news.

[flagged]

Reply on news.ycombinator.com